Javier Mellado, born and raised in Malaga, moved to Madrid in 2006 and is the veteran member of the Software Engineering team at Tuenti. Since joining the company in September 2007, he’s worked on the technical side of user support. The Admin Tools team builds tools that help to manage Tuenti's content quality in terms of spam, underage users, prohibited content, etc.

If you want to get to know him a little better, don't miss the video we've made of him ;)

Finally, after a very long, intense week and one extra day, the first round of the 3rd Tuenti Challenge finished up yesterday at 13:37. During the initial phase, more than 2,100 challenges were solved using more than 200,000 lines of code. Over 3,900 people spent the week hacking their way to the final. Algorithms, data structures, web security, mobile programming, mind quizzes and even assembly language skills were all necessary for finishing the most difficult Tuenti Challenge yet.

We tried to make the challenges accessible to both competitive programmers and newcomers alike, sorted by increasing difficulty and which didn’t always mean increasing time. We know that some of them were going to be quite time-consuming, especially when participants get stuck with a problem for hours with no idea about how to solve it. We tried to alternate between more algorithmic problems and puzzles or hacking challenges, and some were quickly solved once figured out. Take a look at the average time spent on each challenge and the number of people solving them in the graph below:

Even with occasional frustration and difficulties, we hope you enjoyed participating as much as we enjoyed preparing the judge, setting up the new contest website and system, writing and solving all of the problems and monitoring the whole thing. Lots of work, but tons of fun!

We’ve run some stats over the source code we received, the most used languages were Python, Java and C++. You can have a look at the most-used languages in the following chart:

As you can see, we received some solutions coded in Lisp, Matlab, Assembler, Perl...nice to see those!

You can view the final ranking for the 1st round with the top 50 participants that will receive a Tuenti prize pack. To compute the ranking, we had to take into account the number of problems solved in the test phase, the correctness of the final output sent in the submit phase, and the order of participants who solved each challenge. But remember, this was just the first round of the challenge. Right now we are really busy manually reviewing the challenges in order to select the 10 contestants that will make it to the finals at our office on May 24th. You’ll find out who they are very soon!

Rosa studied at the University of Sevilla and finished her Degree in Computer Science in 2008. She worked in research and later went to London to do an MSc. She was there for two years and came to Madrid after participating in the first edition of the Tuenti Challenge. She was the first winner of our contest and has been a part of the Engineering Team at Tuenti ever since.

She's been part of the Backend Framework team for most of her time at Tuenti, but she has recently switched to the Tools team which provides tools and infrastructure to the rest of the Tuenti engineers to support highly efficient, quality coding.

If you want to get to know her a little better, don't miss the video we've made of her ;)

David Iglesias, with a Computer Science degree from the University of Oviedo, finished his studies in 2006 and has worked in web development ever since. He came to Madrid from Asturias in 2009, when he was hired to work at Tuenti. He began on the Product Team, and since the beginning of 2012, he has been a part of the Frontend Framework Team who writes the base code used by the rest of Tuenti’s Frontend programmers.

We’ve put together some videos to help you get to know the Tuenti Tech Team a little better. Meet David here, in our first video ;)

The last, but not least, the conclusion of our interviews with previous winners is wrapped up with Oleg Zaystev. He was born in the Ukraine and came to Spain with his family when he was 14. He finished school here and did a Mathematics degree at UCM, which he finished while working at Tuenti.

How did you find out about the Contest? What made you sign up?
I saw an ad on Tuenti, and I love programming so it was an easy decision. To be honest, I had been counting down the days to start the contest.

What Programming language did you use?
I used Python for all my problems. It’s my favorite programming language and it’s fast enough to solve all problems in a reasonable amount time. The ability to handle very large numbers without doing any extras was another positive point for Python.

Did you expect to be finalist?
Well, I wanted to be more than I expected I would be until the last day. I got stuck on the 8th problem for 2 days, and when I reached the 20th, I almost gave up on it. The inspiration came to me on the last evening and I was finally able to solve them all.

What is the best thing about being part of Tuenti?
You learn a lot every day. Every day you can develop yourself professionally and personally, there’s always somebody to help, and there’s always somebody who appreciates your help.

Who would you encourage to participate?
Anybody who likes programming should participate, even if s/he doesn’t want to work with us. I had a very good time solving the challenges and it didn’t take me a lot of time. In fact, I did most of the challenges at night - early morning, when I was coming back home after playing video games with my friends all night.

Do you remember your favorite challenge? How did you solve it?
It was the 19th challenge. I had to paint the binary code in different colors to find the pattern. It took me a lot of time and I had to tweak the algorithm because I’d never seen it before.

Do you remember the most difficult? How did you solve it?
The most difficult was the funniest one and my favorite! It couldn’t have been any other way.

Don’t forget to sign up! Registration is still open, so hurry up! At Tuenti, we’re already gearing up to start the challenge of the year! Are you ready? ;)